My mind used to be full of the sentence - go to a distant place, there is no scenery in a familiar place. For a while, I always fantasized about the distance, fantasized about the grandeur, and always felt that I could feel the charm of life when I was far away.
When I saw this book "Spring and Summer of Nini the Puppy" and "Autumn and Winter of Nini the Puppy", I realized that I was wrong - in fact, the nearby places are also full of scenery. It's like that saying - life is not without beauty, but lacks the eyes to find beauty.
As long as you find it with your heart, you will understand that life is full of beauty, beauty is all around you, and you will love your life more.
The main character of the book is a puppy named Nini, who appears in the form of a Japanese Akita dog. The author is Japanese picture book writer and illustrator Ai Akikusa. We followed the dog Nini and were able to feel the changes of the four seasons and feel the charm of the four seasons.
Beauty is ordinary, beauty is detail.
Many people will ask, what is beauty? Two points and one line, fast-paced city life, busy as a dog every day, where is there any beauty? Actually, we were really wrong. A lot of times, we're really not as good as a dog. Like this dog, the puppy Nini.
Spring is coming, what is the first message of spring that you feel? If you are in an office building or workshop all the year round, you may not feel it, and for you, it may be that one day you suddenly feel that the padded clothes are too hot, so you feel that the winter has passed. In fact, when you feel that the padded clothes are too thick, spring has already come.
There are many messages of the arrival of spring, such as wild grasses and wild flowers. In "Spring and Summer of Nini the Puppy", the first stanza is "Little Spring". What's in the spring? You may not have noticed before, there are Xinyi flowers, snowdrop flowers, wax petal flowers, crocus, spring orchids, pig's tooth flowers, rattle grass, Tongquan grass, milk vetch, wormwood......
There are names you are familiar with, and there are forms that you are familiar with, and although most of them are still gray, when these plants appear, spring has indeed arrived.
Japan has a temperate oceanic monsoon climate, and many plants have continental similarities. So when spring comes, just like the students in the north found the buds on the willow trees, and the friends in the south found the buds of the magnolia - we haven't felt the change in temperature yet, but the plants are already ready.
Even if it is a monotonous two-point and one-line life, these climate friends, they are always by our side. When you open the window, you can see the buds of the trees, and as you walk along the road, you will find all kinds of tiny plants, whether they are milk vetch or dandelions......
This is the spring, the spring that you have ignored. Instead of planning a two- or three-hour drive to the spring, you can lean down and take in the scenery around you – they're just as beautiful. Beauty is never far from us, it is in ordinary life, it is in our details.
What attracted me to this book is also here. When the author tells this story, he uses the form of pictures and texts, very gentle and meticulous colored pencil paintings, accompanied by simple text explanations. The details are very well done - the images of each animal and plant are very beautifully drawn, the features are obvious, and the illustrations are very clear. We can't help but be amazed - I've seen this plant, and it turns out it's called that.
Beauty is detail, beauty is observation.
No matter how ordinary the scenery is, it will become wonderful because of a pair of eyes that are good at discovering. In this book, we can also feel that the author conveys a very important ability - observation.
Throughout the spring, the author discovers a wide variety of flora and fauna. The ground is covered with protruding green shoots of plants, dandelions are full of small yellow flowers, beetles and various butterflies are on the flowers, and lizards basking in the sun on their stomachs on the stones.
If you think it's just a drawing book, you're wrong. The author not only paints these animals and plants, but also does science popularization for us. For example, when talking about moles, we are shown the mole's nest in the picture book.
All we see is a pile of dirt at the mouth of the mole's nest, but there is a hole in it. Earthworms, their main food, are found in the soil, and when they burrow, they forage for food, and if they can't finish it, they are placed in special storage warehouses. Isn't it amazing that it has a special bedroom for sleeping, and they even have a special drinking place? What's even more amazing is that they also have toilets dedicated to defecation, which is indeed a bit beyond our understanding of animals.
In "Spring and Summer of Nini the Dog", the swallows, wild ducks, and summer insects mentioned are very detailed, and we can read the sense of story and knowledge from these continuous pencil paintings. Especially at the end of each book, the names of animals and plants that appear in the book are integrated in order of upper and lower case letters, and some special animals and plants are accompanied by text popularization.
I have to admire the author's observation, and I also admire the author's expressiveness - he can express the interest of the four seasons in the form of pictures.
The theme of the four seasons is expressed in pencil painting, and the details, fun and beauty are full.
The whole book is expressed in the form of lead paintings, which is very aesthetically pleasing. If you have children at home, you can take out any page and copy it.
The summer vacation is about to begin, if you want to choose books for your children, you might as well choose "Spring and Summer of Nini the Puppy" and "Autumn and Winter of Nini the Puppy", so that the children can feel the rotation of the four seasons from the details, feel the charm of observation from the details, and pick up a paintbrush to draw the four seasons by the way, and see what kind of phenological changes the children can feel.